


Waver

by Barkfoot



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: M/M, Pining, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 19:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11720883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkfoot/pseuds/Barkfoot
Summary: They don't get together on the press tour.





	Waver

Zach reaches up, like he could touch the sky. The light pollution is bad here. The only star he can see is probably an airplane. His hand falls, flopping against his chest.

“ _Wow._ ”

Zach rolls his head right and blinks once or twice at Chris, who's sitting cross-legged on the floor. Chris is laughing at him in the way that’s just an aggressive smile. His eye crinkles are going crazy. Sure it looks good on him now, but Zach knows that Chris is going to be one of those guys who gets gross and haggard young. At least, he'd better be.

“What? Fuck you, Pine.”

“You just. You're so dramatic. All…” Chris stretches his legs out, his wrist artfully bent, his big shovelly hand reaching weakly. “All _Creation of Adam_ right now.” Chris flops back, splaying out his arms. He laughs again.

“Fuck you, Pine.” It's pretty much the most useful response with Chris. Zach’s had to cut back on the fuck yous on the press tour. They spend too much time in interviews, not enough drinking on hotel balconies.

They don't even usually get a balcony.

“I think it's fucked up that we're too drunk to go out and get laid.”

“Excuse me? Chris, _you_ are the fucking one who wanted to stay in. I gave up a boring fucking boyfriend so I could sow my wild Vulcan oats on this tour, and I keep ending up drunk with you while everyone else has a good time.” He can't help but laugh up at the blank sky. _God._ They aren't even drunk, either.

“You should have convinced me to go out, man. Why even bother having an extrovert as a friend if this is what I get? You let me down.”

“You let yourself down. You let men everywhere down. You're hot and famous, Chris-”

“And all those men everywhere will never get to experience my cock if I spend every moment with you. I get it.”

It's not their usual standard of banter, but Zach is laughing now anyway. Chris flails an arm and catches Zach’s pant leg between his fingers and thumb. He rubs at the fabric, brushing against the hairs on Zach's leg. It's not new. Not the casual touch, not Zach's reaction. He slides his bare foot out, until Chris can wrap his hand around Zach's ankle. He really does have big goddamn hands. Zach had looked away, out to the city, full of fuckable people. He looks back at Chris though, who smiles dopily.

“Wanna go to bed?”

Zach kicks his hand and rises. “Do you need my help with that, Princess?” He holds out a hand and pulls Chris up to him. Chris slings himself over Zach’s shoulders as a part of the action of standing, as if it's the natural next motion.

“Zachary,” he murmurs into Zach's ear, “I confess I may have imbibed too much.”

“Christopher,” Zach sighs, “I confess you're an asshole who's had exactly half a bottle of wine over the last two and a half _hours._ If you're trying to prompt a drunken encounter, I remind you again that I am the one who needs to be drunk.”

Chris pulls back, slaps his hands to Zach's cheeks and tells Zach he's a cocksucker. Then he turns and leads Zach into their dark hotel room. Zach crawls onto the bed closest to him, shedding his clothes and curling up on the ugly brown-and-black-and-white bedspread. He yells into the bathroom, “It's completely hypocritical for anyone who likes getting his dick sucked to use ‘cocksucker’ as an insult.”

“You choose to take it as an insult, what does that say about you?” Chris hollers around his toothbrush. “Got some internaghh-” he spits.

“Internalized homophobia?” Zach finishes for him, “I think my problem is your externalized homophobia.”

Chris stands silhouetted in the bathroom doorway for a second, terribly backlit before he flicks the light off. Zach can hear his smile.

“Come on Zach, I'm no homophobe. I have gay friends.”

Painfully predictable. “Fuck you.”

“Please,” Chris fits the word inside a yawn. “I have to be wined and dined first, my friend.”

“That's not the way the Z-listers of LA tell it.”

“Oh yeah, Zach? You been asking around about me?”

It's said more seriously than Chris probably intends. Zach doesn't like any of the obvious jokes that jump to mind, so he fills the room with the sound of his shifting blankets as he works himself between the sheets. He ends up on his side, facing Chris, who meets his eyes. They're both adjusting to the dark.

It's only been a couple of seconds since Chris spoke, so the silence is awkward. It didn't feel like a question meant to be left as the end of a conversation, and now what does Zach say? _Yeah I asked around when we first met because I wanted to know if I could fuck you?_ It's true and too revealing. _I used to want to fuck you_ is too close to _I currently want to both date and fuck you_. It'd be too easy for Chris to make the leap from the one to the other, which would never do. Chris might not be (is definitely not) totally straight, but it doesn't mean he'd date a man, and it doesn't mean he'd be alright with a friend and co-worker pining after him.

“Zach?” Chris asks uncertainly. His face is cast in blue shadows, too pretty and much too intent. Zach hates it. Nothing in particular, and certainly not Chris’s face, but most of the rest of everything else. He tries to pull it all back together, tries to say something light, a little joke to end the night on. It comes out as “I-- If you…” He trails off, helpless and exposed in the dark. It doesn't seem right that everything feels like it's changing right this moment. Nothing has really happened, nothing he can't come back from. Zach rolls onto his back so he won't have to look at Chris’s bewildered expression. He heaves a bitter laugh into the room. A horrible ache is already starting under his breastbone.

Chris shifts, sitting up and swinging his legs into the few feet of space between their beds. Then he's sitting on Zach's bed. Zach rolls away as Chris twists his body toward him. It's juvenile to act like they're a couple of magnets repelling each other, but everything is too much right now.

“Zach, what?” Chris seems so genuinely concerned, his voice all hushed like Zach's on his deathbed. “Is it something I said?” Zach hears him move before he feels Chris’s fingers curl over his shoulder. Zach whips around, except not fucking really because it's impossible to whip lying in bed, so he thrashes gracelessly. Apparently it's too much for Pine to leave him a single moment alone.

“I'm tired, man. I just want to go the fuck to sleep.” Nobody in the history of humanity has ever delivered that line in that tone and been believed, probably. Bad writing, bad acting. And Chris can recognize both.

“Zach,” he says, “come on. Don't be like that.” He smiles, he wants to lighten the mood, but it's really the last thing Zach wants. He doesn't need lightening, he needs to be away from this. He needs Chris to not be the kind of friend who touches him so easily, or for him to be the kind of friend who touches him just a little bit more easily. He needs Chris to not be suddenly an almost-movie star, and for himself to not have been such a coward in the early days of their acquaintanceship, when he had almost nothing to lose.

Right now, in the present, Zach says “Not now, Chris” on a sigh. Chris scoots closer. Zach very nearly sits up, wanting to be level with Chris, wanting to face him. But Chris’s hand drops to Zach's chest. Chris licks his lips, avoids Zach's eye, watches his own splayed hand rising and falling with Zach's white shirt. What the hell he's doing, Zach doesn't know and doesn't want to guess, or hope. He closes his eyes and in the last moment before his eyelids fall shut, Chris’s eyes flick up to Zach's.

In the dark, he hears Chris’s little huff like a laugh. Chris takes his hand back. He rubs his thighs and stands. Then nothing. Chris just stands for a moment between their beds.

“Good night, Chris,” Zach says quietly. He wants there to be no hard feelings. Don't go to bed angry, and everything will be normal (he hopes) in the morning.

Chris moves without speaking, pushing between his sheets, kicking at them, which he doesn't normally do. He must not like the way the tucked-in blankets pin him down. Zach hears him sigh, punch his pillow, and roll over. Zach just dodged a bullet, as far as his friendship with Chris was concerned. Every other way out of tonight would have made everything more complicated, probably more terrible. Their friendship and working relationship could both have been hurt, maybe worse.

Zach listens for anything else from Chris's side of the room, but there's nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Feel free to let me know what you thought.


End file.
